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One tough call in NASCAR's takeover of road racing

January 3, 2013

The future of road racing in the United States will become a clearer at a press conference scheduled for noon on Jan. 4. Photo by LAT PHOTOGRAPHIC

It's Friday. At noon at Daytona International Speedway, there is a press conference scheduled that will outline the future of the merged Grand-Am and American Le Mans Series. I've written before that as mergers go, this one is like the merger of Chrysler and Fiat, in the sense that Italian is the de facto official language of Auburn Hills, Mich.

The press conference today is basically the other shoe dropping in NASCAR's takeover of sports car racing in the U.S. NASCAR and Grand-Am wrote a check for most of the assets of the ALMS, and the remaining ALMS employees get their paychecks from NASCAR, so you figure out who is in charge.

None of this is to suggest that this is a bad thing. In the long run, it isn't. Right now, though, it's sort of a difficult period for some people.

One of those people is Mark Raffauf, Grand-Am's gruff managing director of competition. In the “buck stops here” corporate world, Raffauf had a bad year. It started with a near-disastrous scoring snafu at the Rolex 24, and ended with a post-race decision at the final race of the year, at Lime Rock, that affected the season championship in the Continental Tire Sports Car Challenge series, which runs under the auspices of Grand-Am.

In the first instance, a middle-of-the-night scoring incident may or may not have changed the outcome of the GT class race. The winner was the Magnus Racing Porsche, but there are competitors in the class who are convinced that car was not in the lead at the end of the race. Complaints were heard, but in the end -- and in the grand NASCAR tradition of whoever the fans leaving the race think won, won -- nothing happened. One team owner told me he was so upset with the officiating that, given a choice, he would never race with Grand-Am again. As of 2014, that choice is gone, assuming he still wants to compete in the U.S. at the highest level.

In the last incident, a relatively complex bit of paperwork that was viewed one way by Grand-Am, another way by the RumBum Porsche team and its driver and general manager, Matt Plumb, cost Plumb the season championship, a call made after the Lime Rock race was completed.

Throughout the season, Raffauf and his team made additional controversial calls, some of them regarding on-track incidents, others regarding points. The Starworks Daytona Prototype team, led by principal Peter Baron, complained long and hard about officiating. Baron complains about everything, making him one of the more entertaining guys in the paddock, but this time, it seemed like more than just carping.

As the merger began to take shape, there was a genuine concern on the part of some of the ALMS participants: As Grand-Am assumes the leadership role in this deal, are we going to land in the middle of this officiating controversy?

Thursday, Grand-Am in general, and series founder Jim France in particular -- his name might not be on the press release, but nothing happens in Grand-Am without France's approval -- sent out a release with this title: “Grand-Am Names ALMS Veteran Official Paul Walter New Race Director.” He will also remain race director for ALMS until the end of 2013, when the two jobs become one.

At the end of the release, there was this: “Grand-Am Managing Director of Racing Operations Mark Raffauf, who formerly also served as Grand-Am's race director, will now focus on operational and logistical aspects.”

In short, Raffauf is out, and the ALMS guy is in. Walter, who has worked in multiple series, seems unanimously respected. His promotion will go a long way towards quieting complaints in the Grand-Am garage, and addressing concerns among the ALMS migrants.

Raffauf had been Grand-Am's race director since its beginning in 2000. As managing director of competition, his responsibilities included rules enforcement, event proceedings, technical regulations, driver conduct and briefings and directing the Grand-Am event operations staff. He has spent pretty much his whole adult life in sports car racing, and has been close to the France family all along. This had to be a tough decision, but when the buck stops on your desk, sometimes a new guy gets moved into your chair.

Kevin Buckler, whose The Racer's Group has fielded more cars in the Rolex 24 the past decade or so than anyone else, was one of Raffauf's chief critics. “I think this is a fantastic announcement and a smart move by the series,” he told Autoweek. “Having a racing director working together with both series, sharing common oversight in our transition year makes a lot of sense. Paul has a tremendous amount of respect from all of the competitors and we look forward to supporting him.”

That was the sentiment of the team owners I spoke to.

But let's not forget that Raffauf was the hands-on guy who helped turn Grand-Am into the series that eventually won the war, a job that included the unenviable task of competition-balancing a rag-tag, mismatched bunch of cars and engines and listening to the complaints of racers and team owners, a group that, except perhaps for motorsports journalists, may whine more than any single group of humans in the world.